


If you're lost you can look and you will find me

by Elisexyz



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy Lives, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everybody Lives, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-20 12:54:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17622755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisexyz/pseuds/Elisexyz
Summary: Neal turns towards her, a wide encouraging grin spread on his face. “I can see the top, just hold on a little longer,” he assures. “We’re almost home.”





	If you're lost you can look and you will find me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Tumblr prompt: [64\. “Talk to me.” + Swanfire](http://heytheredeann.tumblr.com/post/182532073804/64-talk-to-me-for-swanfire-if-i-may). Title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rSesUyoKtM).

Emma puffs, loudly, trying for the millionth time to gather as much as she can of her dress in her hands, so that it doesn’t get caught up in any of the plants around her. It’s a fool’s errand, but one has to try.

Neal tried to help at first, but they discovered that him trying to keep up the dress only makes it more difficult for her to walk, so he has started taking her hand on occasion and dedicating himself to pep talks.

“I’m going to kill someone,” she growls. She doesn’t know _who_ , but she’ll find a candidate that she can blame for this. Whoever designed the dress would do nicely, for instance.

“Come on, you’re doing fine,” Neal grins, apparently amused by her homicidal plans, as he reaches over to help her step over some fallen tree. It normally wouldn’t be a problem, but with a dress that weights twice as her and a skirt so _big_ that she can’t keep it all up with both arms she’d probably _die_ on her own.

“Says you, in your Disney prince clothes,” she replies, glaring at what literally looks like a royal uniform brought to life from a Disney cartoon. Which kind of makes sense, but it’s still unfair that she’s stuck in a _dress_ and he gets to wear _that_. “My feet are killing me,” she adds. She’s starting to consider taking her shoes off, because getting all sorts of pieces of wood stuck in her feet can’t be worse than _this_.

“I’d give you a piggy-back ride, if you weren’t wearing that thing,” he grins.

There’s a fairly steep climb right ahead, and Emma is already groaning internally when Neal grabs her hand, probably planning on pulling her all the way up. She isn’t about to complain if he wants to do half the work for her.

“You could carry me bridal style,” she points out, jokingly.

He snorts. “Do you _want_ me to?”

Yeah, no, she has a little bit of dignity left still. And the dress would probably get in the way of that too. And it’d be an asshole move to make him do all the work anyway. “Not really, no,” she concedes.

She’d swear that the climb is getting steeper by the minute, and she grabs Neal’s hand tighter.

“Maybe we should stop for a second,” she says, tentatively.

Neal turns towards her, a wide encouraging grin spread on his face. “I can see the top, just hold on a little longer,” he assures. “We’re almost home.”

Emma’s breath catches in her throat, and her stomach twists unpleasantly at his words.

“Tallahassee,” she whispers to herself, trying to make it _click_ even though the thought keeps slipping away: she knows that there’s a connection there, but it’s like she has something on the tip of her tongue and she can’t get it out.

She can see the top too now. They’re almost there. For a moment, she’s sure they’ll reach it.

The ground start trembling under their feet, green light breaking through the grass and splitting everything in half. She thinks she screamed, at some point, when she felt herself fall and she could only grab the first solid thing her fingers could reach. Her other hand is still tight around Neal’s, but he’s now below her, hanging over nothing and threatening to slip away any second.

“Hold on!” she yells, trying to pull him up although she already knows she can’t manage – not when she’s barely hanging on herself and he’s dead weight – tears welling up behind her eyes as helplessness sinks in. “I don’t know what to _do_ ,” she says, her voice breaking. She isn’t even sure that he heard, and she can only look around, search for _something_ —

“Emma!” he catches her attention, and she blinks away a veil of tears, looking down on him. “It’s okay,” he smiles, reassuringly. “We’re almost home.”

She knows what’s coming, yet she can do nothing to stop it.

“Neal—”

He lets go.

 

She wakes up with a gasp, her legs kicking the air in a spasm and her foot hitting something as a result.

She swallows back a curse, trying to level her breath and collect her thoughts to remember where she is and what the hell is going on, because this certainly isn’t her bed and her back is _killing_ her—

As her eyes focus in the darkness, she recognizes the shape of Regina’s living room, and she remembers that they were all gathered there for her bachelorette party, whereas Henry went to sleep at her parents’. Right. She’s getting married. She and Neal are getting married.

Her heart is still stuck in her throat, beating like crazy, even if she tells herself over and over that it was only a nightmare and that there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

It’s not like, historically, whenever they thought they’d be alright and happy the world found a way to screw them over again, right? Her fear that they are heading straight towards a cliff is completely unfounded.

Right.

She decides to get up and fetch herself a glass of water. She grabs her phone from a coffee table, checking the hour only to find out that it’s past five in the morning, she carefully avoids stepping on Regina and Belle, who somehow ended up tangled around each other – Emma honestly can’t remember _how_ –, she notices Ruby’s leg just in time not to trip on it, which almost ends with her stepping over Ashley in turn, but she manages to make it to the kitchen without killing herself or anybody else. Small victories.

The glass of water does very little for her nerves. So does pacing around like a madwoman, telling herself that everything is _fine_ — because, yeah, maybe everything is fine _now_ , but what about tomorrow? Will they even make it to the altar? Because there’s a good chance that a big disaster will fall right onto their laps before they can even _start_ the ceremony.

Neal would probably say that she’s paranoid. She probably needs to hear it.

Before she can talk herself out of it, she makes the call.

“ _Yeah?”_ Neal answers after the forth ring, sounding half-dead in her opinion. Her shoulders relax a little anyway.

She can hear sounds of life in the background, and she frowns, amused. “Are you guys still up?”

“ _Uh, more or less_ ,” Neal mumbles. “ _Robin’s passed out on the couch, I was dozing off too— Tink decided that it’d be a good idea to challenge Hook at some drinking game. They’re still going, I have no idea how many shots they are in, but I don’t think they should be sitting straight right now_.”

She snorts, trying to picture the scene: Tinkerbell never made an effort to hide that she doesn’t really like Hook that much, so Emma is willing to bet that the whole game became rather competitive.

“Just make sure no one dies of alcohol poisoning.”

Neal scoffs. “ _Tink’s a fairy, she should be fine. And Hook has more rum than blood in his system, he’s good_.”

“And you?” she asks, trying to make it sound casual. He sounds pretty tired, but not in a bad way, and talking to him is making her feel better already, but she still sort of needs to ask. It’s no guarantee that everything will still be fine tomorrow, but— “You’re good too?”

“ _I didn’t get shitfaced if that’s what you mean_ ,” he jokes. When she fails to follow his lead in reasonable time, she can almost _feel_ his concern making an appearance. “ _Is everything alright?”_ he asks, carefully.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine,” she says, shrugging before she remembers that he can’t see. “I mean, we were all sleeping already. I woke up. Everything’s good.”

“ _Emma_.” And of course he doesn’t buy it. It’s no surprise, and a part of her doesn’t really _mind_. She wants to hear him say that she’s paranoid and everything is going to be alright. “ _Come on, talk to me. What’s wrong?”_

She swallows heavily. “I just had a—a dream. And it got me thinking.”

“ _Uh, that’s bad. There should be no thinking at bachelorette parties._ ”

She snorts, amused. “Shut up.” She leans slightly against the counter in front of her, drumming her fingers on it as she looks for the right way to phrase this without sounding too stupid. “What if tomorrow is a disaster?” she finally spews out, quickly.

A pause. “ _We had two bridezillas on the team_ ,” he points out, a note of levity still in his voice. “ _I think they’ve planned everything_.”

“I’m not talking about the ceremony,” she explains, drawing an heavy sigh. “I mean, _yes_ , but— things don’t usually— work out well for us, you know? Hell, the last time that we planned on settling down was—”

“ _Tallahassee_ ,” he completes, grimly. “ _Yeah, I remember_.” A pause. “ _So you’re having second thoughts?”_

“Not in the self-deprecating way you mean it,” she clarifies, because she knows him well enough to guess that he means it in all the wrong ways. “I’m just— scared. What if all this is just the calm before the storm?”

“ _Well, at least if we are married there’s life insurance?”_

“Neal.”

“ _Okay, okay, sorry_ ,” he quickly amends. “ _Look, if there’s some disaster waiting to happen— and there probably is, this town is a magnet for trouble— I don’t think that us not getting married would stop it. And, I mean, we’ve gone through enough shit for me to be pretty certain by now that nothing short of the end of the world would break us up_.” A pause. “ _That being said, it’s been a while since one of us has been thrown into another realm or something, so I’d watch out for magic beans tomorrow, if I were you_ ,” he adds, and she can picture his half-smile as he nudges her a little in the arm, trying to get her to crack a smile too.

She does, shaking her head a little. “So you’re saying I’m paranoid, basically,” she comments, her tone much lighter than before. The tension is mostly gone from her shoulders, she can breathe more easily and her stomach isn’t tied in knots anymore.

“ _A little bit_ ,” he admits, just as there’s a loud crash in the background.

“What was that?” Emma asks, unsure if she should be concerned or amused.

“ _The bottle fell off the table_ ,” Neal explains. There’s cursing in the background, although she isn’t sure who it is coming from. “ _Five bucks says they’ll try to lick it off the floor or something_.”

“Oh, come on, they wouldn’t—”

“ _Apparently yes—_ Killian _, stop that— get another bottle if you need one, dude, seriously—_ ”

Emma snorts a laugh, trying to muffle the sound as much as possible not to wake anybody else up. “I think you should go make sure that nobody swallows pieces of glass or something.”

“ _Uh, yeah_ —” A pause. “ _You okay, though? I can come over if you need me to_.”

“No, no, I’m fine,” she assures, and it isn’t even a lie, because she does feel better about the whole thing. Guess she just got panicky for a minute. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“ _Alright, see you tomorrow_ ,” he replies, flippantly, and she can easily picture his grin. He has had that enthusiastic and besotted expression plastered on his face more and more as the date of the wedding drew near.

She puts down the phone, a slight smile still on her face: they are almost there, and even if something were to happen, they’d just deal with it, together. After all, they have a pretty decent success rate so far, don’t they?

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including: 
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

> 
> If you don’t want a reply, for any reason, feel free to sign your comment with “whisper” and I will appreciate it but not respond!


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